Google Buys PittPatt Facial Recognition Tech

Google has purchased PittPatt, a technology that could almost certainly be used to automatically tag people in photos and videos. Google has said facial-recognition technology is coming, but not without privacy protection.

Google has purchased Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, or PittPatt, a technology that could almost certainly be used to automatically tag people in photos and videos.

"Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004," the company said. "We've worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products. At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it's a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications."

To date, however, Google hasn't quite used facial recognition technology to automatically tag people. In 2008, Google purchased a facial-recognition startup called Neven Vision, and implemented its technology into Picasa. Today, users can highlight a face in an uploaded photo and then tag it; other photos are then recognized and organized according to the name of the user.

"As we've said for more than a year, we will not add facial recognition to Goggles unless we have strong privacy protections in place," a spokesman told PCMag.com in March. "We're still working on them. We have nothing to announce at this time."

PittPatt appears to use technology that's somewhat similar to facial-recognition or smile-recognition technology used by some digital cameras, where the user's face is highlighted for focusing purposes.

According to documentation on the PittPatt Web site, the software looks for faces that are oriented on a plane facing the user, with an offset of a varying number of degrees. The software then automatically aligns the facial image to examine it for "landmarks," such as the width of the eyes, for example.

PittPatt's software then uses one of three recognizer techniques, such as a frontal recongnizer (for portraits) as well as a multi-pose recognizer for video or more offset shots. The recognizer then constructs a template, which is then matched against a known database of templates, which Google would presumably store in the cloud. Tagging could be accomplished by matching the extracted template with the one it best matches in the database.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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